First Hurricane Sandy, now Winter Storm Athena for the Eastern U.S.

Winter Storm Warnings are up for Southwest New Jersey, Northern Delaware, and Southeast Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, PA, where Winter Storm Athena is expected to drop 3 - 5" of snow today through Thursday morning. Slushy accumulations of up to 1" are likely in Baltimore, and non-accumulating snow will fall as far south as Washington, DC. Athena, the season's first Nor'easter and first winter storm to get a name under The Weather Channel's new naming system, is spreading rain and high winds into Southern New Jersey and Eastern Long Island, NY this morning. Winds at buoy 44025, about 40 miles offshore from the coast of Central New Jersey, reached 40 mph, gusting to 49 mph, with a significant wave height of 14', at noon EST. Winds at Nantucket, MA have gusted as high as 54 mph this morning. Athena is building a storm surge that has already reached 2.2' at Atlantic City and 1.8' at New York City as of noon EST. A storm surge of 2 - 3.5' is likely along the section of coast most heavily damaged by Sandy's storm surge, and battering waves up to 20' high will cause moderate beach erosion along much of the New Jersey and New York shoreline. The storm surge will cause minor to moderate flooding during this afternoon's high tide cycle near 1 pm EST, and again at the next high tide, near 1 am EST Thursday morning. Fortunately, the high tides this week will be some of the lowest of the month, since we are midway between the new moon and full moon. Wind gusts from Athena will likely reach 50 mph along the coasts of New Jersey and Southern Long Island, NY, and could hit 60 mph on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I expect that Athena's winds, rains, and wet, heavy snows will cause up to 50,000 new power outages today. As of early Wednesday morning, 676,000 customers were still without power in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (down from a peak of 8.5 million customers.)

The decision to name AthenaThe Weather Channel announced in October that they would begin naming winter storms this year, in an effort to aid in raising awareness and reduce the risks the public faces. One of the main criteria for naming a storm is its impact on populated areas; the meteorology of the storm may not get it named, if the storm doesn't affect a populated area. If Hurricane Sandy had not devastated the region of coast being affected by today's Winter Storm Athena, it may not have gotten a name. With so many people still under recovery efforts even well inland, the combination of heavy, wet snow and wind prompted the decision to name Athena. The models have been trending towards more cold air getting pulled into this system, so it is possible Athena could drop heavier snows than currently advertised. The National Weather Service will not be referring to today's Nor'easter as "Athena". They put out this internal directive: "The NWS does not use named winter storms in our products. Please refrain from using the term Athena in any of our products."

Here are the peak wind gusts from Athena as of 11 am EST on Wednesday, November 7, 2012:

Quoting barbamz:Storm Aftermath: Continuing CoverageBy THE NEW YORK TIMES

Wednesday’s snowy northeaster knocked out power to nearly 350,000 homes in New York and New Jersey and interrupted train service on the Long Island Rail Road, setting back the recovery effort in a region still reeling from Hurricane Sandy.

Good morning over there ... I'm sorry to see those news. --- Tomorrow I'll leave for two days to take part in a conference in Switzerland. I've just heard that several lecturers from the US probably won't be able to come because their flights were cancelled or they got stuck at the airport due to beloved "Athena"...

Best greetings and good recovery for you people in the NE! See you next week. Barb

Wednesday’s snowy northeaster knocked out power to nearly 350,000 homes in New York and New Jersey and interrupted train service on the Long Island Rail Road, setting back the recovery effort in a region still reeling from Hurricane Sandy.

Good morning over there ... I'm sorry to see those news. --- Tomorrow I'll leave for two days to take part in a conference in Switzerland. I've just heard that several lecturers from the US probably won't be able to come because their flights were cancelled or they got stuck at the airport due to beloved "Athena"...

Best greetings and good recovery for you people in the NE! See you next week. Barb

Gauteng storm warningGAUTENG - The South Africa Weather service has issued a storm warning in the province for this afternoon, Thursday 8 November.08 November 2012 State metrologists, based in pretoria, said unusual weather was expected over Midrand, Kyalami, Randburg and Sandton CBD.

Two weeks ago, a huge electrical storm hit Johannesburg, leaving devastation in its path. Hail stones the size of golf balls were reported throughout the city. Windows were smashed and vehicles looked as if they had been riddled with bullets after the storm.

Residents are advised to park under cover to prevent vehicle damage, plan their routes, and drive with caution.

Allan Hill commented on twitter; "Take it very easy if you are in JHB, apparently a huge storm with very heavy rain an hail approaching from the south."

Juac Mostert, who may have been affected by the first major storm of the season in Johannesburg, tweeted; "Everyone in JHB, there's a massive hail storm heading over from Boksburg [east] side. Hide your kids, hide your wives, and park your cars under cover!"

Quoting JeffMasters:Latest 06Z GFS shows an unsettling possibility for Nov 22 - 23: a tropical cyclone heading towards New England, a blocking ridge in place over Greenland, and a strong negatively tilted trough over the Eastern U.S., which would have the potential to pull the tropical cyclone to the NW and merge with a big extratropical cyclone over New England. Granted, 2-week GFS forecasts are very low reliability, but I don't like seeing another Sandy-type situation predicted by the GFS.

Jeff Masters

That wouldn't be so bad; it's not like anyone ever travels during the last full week of November... ;-)

But it DOES change something ... it depreciates the meaning of naming storms that really matter. This noreaster is just a piff compared to Sandy or other tropical events.

Too, television is generally vulgar and appeals to vulgar people. I avoid people that watch it, TTYTT. The idea that TV related people would suppose that they may presume to make this move, even in a pop-culture sense, is also offensive and ghastily pretentious.

Quoting TomballTXPride:Leavin' Texas, fourth day of July,Sun so hot, the clouds so low, the eagles filled the sky.Catch the Detroit Lightnin' out of Sante Fe,The Great Northern out of Cheyenne, from sea to shining sea.

Missing the lyrics that used to be interspersed around the blog LOL :).....Back to lurk mode

Not uncommon for unscrupulous contractors to gather folks up and haul them to disasters, get them to work a few weeks, then skip out without paying them. Please be careful not to be scammed. I've seen these crews left without food and housing trying to get meals from the Red Cross (who are supposed to be serving disaster survivors.) Crews don't even have the cash to get home.

Quoting MontanaZephyr:I can't quite put my finger on why, but there is something vulgar and crass about this naming of winter storms.

Why? Could it be that it is because it is not a discrete entity in the way that a tropical system is...?

Winter storms in the past have developed names when they were memorable... "The Great Blizzard" (1888), for instance. But this Athena business.... who in the world is going to remember this storm even a month from now...? The only name that it even remotely deserves is "Son of Sandy", due to its proximity in time to Sandy.... which makes some people and property more vulnerable... but any other time, any New Yorker would simply call it "November", put on a rain slicker, maybe, and not give it another thought.

THAT is what the problem is: They are elevating the trivial, and, by doing so, somewhat throwing a blanket over events that are not trivial. What's to be next...? The naming of individual clouds?

Hooray for the NWS position on this silliness!

I agree with Montana here. Winter storms should not be named at all...they come and go and people really don't care if it is named or not. If it's memorable in some way, put a label on it and be done with it.

Quoting JeffMasters:Latest 06Z GFS shows an unsettling possibility for Nov 22 - 23: a tropical cyclone heading towards New England, a blocking ridge in place over Greenland, and a strong negatively tilted trough over the Eastern U.S., which would have the potential to pull the tropical cyclone to the NW and merge with a big extratropical cyclone over New England. Granted, 2-week GFS forecasts are very low reliability, but I don't like seeing another Sandy-type situation predicted by the GFS.

Good morning all. This morning's podcast on EarthSky.org has an interesting feature on hole punch clouds.

Andrew Heymsfield on hole-punch clouds made by jets

Excerpt: You might be familiar with contrails, those wispy strands of clouds made by jet exhaust high in the sky. But you might never have seen a hole-punch cloud. They’re very strange clearings in the cloud cover – clear patches of sky, often with a circular shape. Sometimes people report them as UFOs. Some thought airplanes created hole-punch clouds – but just how they did it was unclear.

EarthSky spoke with Andrew Heymsfield, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He led a team that showed a relationship between these strange-looking clouds, jet aircraft and snowfall. He told EarthSky:

This whole idea of jet aircraft making these features has to do with cooling of air over the wings that generates ice.

His team found that – at lower altitudes – jets can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. As a plane flies through mid-level clouds, it forces air to expand rapidly and cool. Water droplets in the cloud freeze to ice and then turn to snow as they fall. The gap expands to create spectacular holes in the clouds.

He said: "We found an exemplary case of hole-punch clouds over Texas. From satellite imagery you could see holes just pocketing the sky, holes and long channels where aircraft had been flying at that level of the cloud for a while."

Dr. Heymsfield used a weather forecast model developed at NCAR – and radar images of clouds from NASA’s CloudSat satellite – to explain the physics of how jet aircraft make hole-punch clouds.